If Kimberly Roberts, the dynamo at the center of the documentary "Trouble the Water,” wasn’t a big woman with a great big mouth, her
video images of Hurricane Katrina and the floodwaters that washed away
her world in 2005 might have ended up as just another pixelated smear
on YouTube. Happily for her and the rest of us, the filmmakers Carl
Deal and Tia Lessin, both of whom have done time working with Michael
Moore, realized that Ms. Roberts was a dream of a documentary subject.
She didn’t just fill the frame with her outsize personality and outlaw
swagger, she also shook it up with raw images of snatched, saved and
lost lives.

Ms. Roberts didn’t wait out the storm from her home in the Lower
Ninth Ward; she chased it. Roaming her neighborhood on foot and
bicycle, she videotaped the gathering dark clouds and her stranded
neighbors with a newly bought camera, watching with mounting concern as
the drizzle grew into a deluge. Her rough, untutored camerawork has an
ugliness and urgency that only add to the escalating sense of chaos and
unease. As her sightlines roughly shift from one fugitive image to the
next — wary adults, giggly children, nervous dogs, a stop sign that
will soon be almost entirely under water — you can feel the pressure of
the moment. Excitement courses through her free-ranging chatter and the
palsied, swerving visuals.

Ms. Roberts and her husband, Scott Roberts, a man with a gentle
smile and a long, thin scar grooved into a cheek, made it out of their
rickety attic alive, along with some neighbors. They also made their
way to a Red Cross shelter, where they met Mr. Deal and Ms. Lessin, yet
another couple, though one on the prowl for a story, not salvation (in
a way they got both). The filmmakers had flown from New York to
Louisiana intending to follow National Guard troops who, in returning
from Iraq, had left one disaster for another. A mouthpiece for the
National Guard shut down their access, but before the storm chasers
could pack up, Ms. Roberts pounced, asking if they wanted a look at
what she had caught on video.

Mr. Deal and Ms. Lessin jumped in turn and began following after
these gregarious refugees, tagging alongside the Robertses and their
sad-eyed new friend, Brian, also from the Lower Ninth, including to
Tennessee. There one of Ms. Roberts’s hosts tearfully vows that her
son, who has thoughts of joining the Army, will not fight for a country
that seems to have forgotten its black and its poor. Ms. Roberts, who
often puts her faith in God but tends to take matters into her own
capable hands, expresses little anger at the government. She isn’t
especially at peace with her country, just resigned, so much so that
she almost shrugs when she delivers the movie’s most devastating line,
saying it felt as if “we lost our citizenship.”

That’s about as on-message as the movie gets, though of course
Katrina itself carries the stench of politics, as a clip of a
dazed-looking Michael D. Brown, who was then director of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, affirms. Save for some righteous
indignation at the close, “Trouble the Water” makes its points without
didacticism, perhaps guided by the Robertses, who are interested in
surviving, not grandstanding. That’s true even weeks after the storm,
when they, Brian and the filmmakers return to New Orleans, where the
streets are clogged with mud and debris. A dead dog rots in the sun,
and inside one shabby home the body of Ms. Roberts’s uncle bloats in
the heat. She goes inside, while the camera idles behind at a
respectful distance.

Ms. Roberts is such a charismatic figure that she might have
overwhelmed this movie. But Mr. Deal and Ms. Lessin have the big
picture in mind, not just a personal portrait. Working with the editors
T. Woody Richman and Mary Lampson, they have created an ingeniously
fluid narrative structure that, when combined with Ms. Roberts’s
visuals, news material and their own original 16-millimeter film
footage, ebbs and flows like great drama. The early part of the movie
is dominated by the Robertses’ seeking higher ground in their home as
the water rises from street to porch and beyond, while the remainder
follows them as they sift through the storm’s wake, searching for a new
start in a city that has all but shut down.

Though her street savvy helped her survive natural and unnatural
disasters, it was a familiar love of the camera that turned Ms.
Roberts, an aspiring musician, into a documentary star. (That’s her
rapping over the final credits under her nom de hip-hop, Black Kold
Madina.) As it does for a lot of young Americans — she is 24 when the
movie opens — being in front of a camera seems perfectly natural to
her, something close to a generational birthright. Left motherless and
impoverished during adolescence, she had probably been looking for
attention for a long time. It took the sight of poor and black
Americans desperately waving for help from rooftops and bridges,
though, before she received her close-up. I just hope this movie gives
her more than 15 minutes.

TROUBLE THE WATER

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Produced and directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal; directors of
photography, P. J. Raval and Kimberly Roberts; edited by T. Woody
Richman; music by Davidge/Del Naja; released by Zeitgeist Films. In
Manhattan at the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third
Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. This film
is not rated.

August 22, 2008

Huntington Hartford's old Gallery of Modern
Art--the white marble bonbon that stood at 2 Columbus Circle from 1964
until a couple of years ago--was a hard building to love but became an
even harder one to hate. Excoriated by critics when it went up, then
championed by preservationists when it was threatened with destruction,
the building provides an object lesson in the inexorable march of
architectural fashion and may point to an even more basic truth about
people and buildings: we get used to things we don't like and then come
to like things we’ve got used to. The eventual decision to refurbish
the building entirely has also provided a young Oregon architect named
Brad Cloepfil with a dauntingly controversial commission.

The
Gallery of Modern Art, one of several quixotic cultural projects
launched by Hartford, an heir to the A. & P. fortune, who died
earlier this year at the age of ninety-seven, was originally intended
to house his collection of figurative works and to stand as a riposte
to what Hartford saw as the reign of abstraction at the Museum of
Modern Art. The architect was Edward Durell Stone. Stone had been a
leading American exponent of the International Style, but, in the
fifties, his new wife, a fashion writer he met on an airplane,
encouraged him toward elegance and decoration, and he began to fill his
buildings with glitter and marble and screens and gold columns.

As
a museum, the Columbus Circle building was a disaster. The galleries,
tricked out with expensive wood panelling and brass fixtures, were
cramped, and the institution closed after five financially ruinous
years. And yet somehow the structure's dainty columns, tiny portholes,
huge arches, and vast windowless expanses of flat, unadorned white
marble embedded themselves more deeply into the consciousness of New
Yorkers than many better buildings. So what if it looked like a Bauhaus
version of the Alhambra--or, as Ada Louise Huxtable, then the
architecture critic at the Times, put it, "a die-cut Venetian
palazzo on lollypops"? Amid the austere glass boxes of the
nineteen-fifties and sixties, it seemed to strike a blow for quirky
individualism. Huxtable's harsh judgment gave rise to a nickname--the
Lollipop Building--that was as much affectionate as mocking.

The
building eventually wound up in the hands of the city, which, in 1998,
decided to sell it to the highest bidder. The city repeatedly refused
to have its own Landmarks Preservation Commission consider giving 2
Columbus Circle landmark status, a move that provoked outrage but kept
the building salable and more or less sealed its fate. Whether or not
the building deserved landmark status depends on what you think a
landmark should be: it wasn't great architecture, but it had unique
qualities and some historical importance. In 2002, the city agreed to
sell it to the Museum of Arts and Design, formerly the American Crafts
Museum. The museum was eager for an architect who had never built in
New York before, and hired Cloepfil, whose firm, Allied Works
Architecture, in Portland, was just completing its first major project,
the sharp and serene Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. Cloepfil
started work on his design while the legal struggle to preserve the
building was in progress, but in 2005 the preservationists lost in
court, and construction began. The building will open next month.

Cloepfil ended up all but demolishing the original
building and creating a new one of exactly the same shape and size, and
almost the same color. He kept the gentle curve reflecting the shape of
Columbus Circle but changed just about everything else. To let light
into the interior, he made long linear incisions, two feet wide, in the
façade. These glass channels--Cloepfil has called them "ribbons of
light"--make a number of right-angle turns across the façade. In place
of Stone's marble are twenty-two thousand terra-cotta tiles specially
made with a slightly iridescent glaze. Depending on the light, they
look white or off-white or sparkle with tiny hints of color. Cloepfil
told me that the use of ceramic and glass tied the new building to its
role as a museum of craft, while its echo of the original marble's
color would suggest continuity with the earlier building. Fair enough.
But that dual goal encapsulates the building's main problem. Cloepfil
is trying as hard as he can to be different while trying also to be the
same. Rarely has an architect been pulled so completely in opposite
directions.

In some respects, he probably didn't have much
choice. He couldn't make the building taller, because of zoning laws,
and he couldn't make it bigger, because it already filled every inch of
its site. And, since museums require mostly solid, windowless walls, he
was stuck with those, too. Cloepfil is a sophisticated architect who,
at his best, can endow simple geometries with a powerful dignity. His
style couldn't be more different from that of Edward Durell Stone's
late period, which dances on the edge of kitsch, and he has tried to
transform Stone's fussy marble froufrou into something serious and
tasteful. Sometimes, as in the long, turning lines of glass, he manages
to assert himself firmly enough to keep the old building at bay. At
other times, like at the base of the building, where he has kept all
but one of Stone's lollipop-shaped columns and put them behind glass,
he seems to have given up altogether and settled for a curatorial role.
Ultimately, Cloepfil has been trapped between paying homage to a
legendary building and making something of his own. As a result, if you
knew the old building, it is nearly impossible to get it out of your
mind when you look at the new one. And, if you've never seen Columbus
Circle before, you probably won't be satisfied, either: the building's
proportions and composition seem just as odd and awkward as they ever
did.

But
if you go inside, entering through the glass-enclosed lobby, from which
an elegantly detailed staircase of wood and steel leads up to four
floors of galleries, it turns out that Cloepfil has done the
impossible--making the building's interior at long last functional,
logical, and pleasant to be in. He figured out early on that Stone had
made a huge mistake putting the building’s core--its elevators, stairs,
and rest rooms--in the center, because that left just a tiny doughnut of
usable space around the perimeter. Cloepfil moved two staircases behind
the elevators, opening up space on every floor and making decent-sized
exhibition galleries possible.

This move also enabled the
building to address Columbus Circle more effectively than before.
Galleries now have windows looking out over Central Park and, on the
ninth floor, there will be a restaurant featuring an entire wall of
glass, something the museum insisted on despite Cloepfil's objections
that it would damage the composition of his façade. This might seem a
little precious--why shouldn't the restaurant have a nice, big
window?--but Cloepfil was right. The window, running between two
vertical glass ribbons, creates a huge "H" on the façade, a pity,
because the ribbons are the heart of his design and its most brilliant
feature. Once you are inside, you discover that they run not only up
and down the façade but also horizontally, into the museum itself: from
each vertical window notched into a gallery's wall, a glass ribbon
stretches across the floor and you seem to be walking on thin air.
Looking down can be vertiginous at first, but the glass channels allow
light to permeate up and down the building, and tie the entire
building, inside and out, together in a way that underscores what is
new about it. It's not just that they look different from anything in
Stone's original museum; requiring a completely different structure and
engineering, they remind you that this is in almost every way a new
building, albeit trapped in the body of an old one, screaming to get
out.

Birds Nest, in the Style of Cubism, a painting by Zhang Hongtu, is now at the Lin & Keng Gallery in Taipei, awaiting shipment back to New York, reports the Wall Street Journal's
David d'Arcy. The ashen-brown piece shows the gleaming new Olympic
stadium, designed by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, as
Picasso might have painted it--as a decaying ruin rendered in fragmented
angled forms. On the canvas, cubist-style, are inscriptions in English
letters and Chinese characters: TIBET, HUMAN RIGHT, and the Olympic
motto, ONE WORLD, ONE DREAM. The painting was supposed to be in Beijing
during the Olympic Games, in the exhibition "Go Game, Beijing!"
organized by a Berlin marketing firm and displayed at the German
Embassy. But it was seized by customs on arrival and denied entry as "unacceptable" for its color, its depiction of the stadium, and its
inscriptions. The artist, Zhang, has lived in New York since 1982, when
he left China to study at the Art Students League. His work, which
blends Chinese and Western styles, often satirizes Chinese political
icons, as when he put the image of Mao Zedong on Quaker Oats boxes.
Speaking about Zhang, Jerome Silbergeld, a professor of Chinese art at
Princeton, said, "This is part of his own dialogue with China and the
Chinese government, and he got an answer."

The Wall Street Journal also reports on its blog
that James Powderly, an American graffiti and laser artist, has been
detained by the Chinese government. Powderly was planning to debut a
new "laser stencil" in Beijing that would have beamed words and images
up to three stories high onto large flat surfaces such as billboards
and building facades. On Tuesday, Students for a Free Tibet received a
message that Powderly had been detained since 3 AM, his whereabouts
unknown. Previously, the group that Powderly founded, Graffiti Research
Lab, was disinvited from a group exhibition on new media art at a
Beijing museum. In a statement Powderly said he was "proud to have been
kicked out of the 'Synthetic Times' new media art exhibition in Beijing
because he wouldn’t censor his little art project." Powderly’s work
still managed to be seen in Beijing, albeit on much smaller (and
briefer) scale. Last night, a group of five activists affiliated with
Students for a Free Tibet used one of Powderly's inventions, LED "throwies" to spell out FREE TIBET in English and Chinese in Beijing's
Olympic Park. The five were detained by security personnel after
displaying the banner for about twenty seconds.

BEIJING -- In their latest confrontation with pro-Tibetan protesters
during the Olympics, Chinese authorities arrested five Americans on
Tuesday after they spelled out "Free Tibet" with blue L.E.D. lights
near the National Stadium. Three other people, including a New York
artist who fashions giant displays with lasers on buildings, were
detained for a separate protest.

Representatives of the group Students for a Free Tibet, which
organized both protests, said they had yet to hear from those who had
been detained. "We're always worried when someone is in Chinese
detention," said Lhadon Tethong, the executive director of the group.

Since
Aug. 8, members of the organization have staged seven protests
involving 37 people. All of those who were detained were promptly
deported.

On Tuesday, five protesters hoisted a banner near the
National Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest, around 11 p.m. and
projected their message in Chinese and English using blue lights. The
display lasted just 20 seconds before the police intervened, organizers
said. The arrested protesters were Amy Johnson, 33, Sam Corbin, 24,
Liza Smith, 31, Jacob Blumenfeld, 26, and Lauren Valle, 21.

Less
information was available about the other three detained protesters,
who intended to use lasers to spell out "Free Tibet" on a Beijing
landmark. Organizers said it was unclear which landmark was to have
been used.

The project's mastermind, James Powderly, 31, is a
Brooklyn artist who recently showed his work at an exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York entitled "Design and the Elastic
Mind." His wife, Michelle Kempner, said he had planned to show his work
at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing but withdrew after
learning the contents of the show would be subject to official approval.

She
said he had invented a laser stencil the size of a flashlight that can
throw beams of light 30 feet high. The device is powered by a small
battery. Before arriving in China on Friday, Mr. Powderly told her that
his goal was to spell the words "Free Tibet" on a prominent building
near Tiananmen Square, she said.

Two video bloggers, Brian
Conley, 28, and Jeffrey Rae, 28, were with Mr. Powderly when he was
detained. On Tuesday night, he sent a text message to a friend saying
he had been held since 3 a.m. on Monday.

"James has always been
dedicated to providing tools for free speech," Ms. Kempner said in a
telephone interview. "I'm trying not to think about it because it makes
me nervous, but I'm also really confident."

Ms. Tethong of
Students for a Free Tibet said other protesters were still in Beijing
and that more actions were planned for the coming days. Given the tight
security, she said she was pleased with the results so far. "Considering how badly the Chinese leadership doesn't want Tibet to be talked about, I think it would be considered a success," she said.

She
said she was more concerned with the plight of protesters in Tibet. In
recent days, she said, at least three people have reportedly been
killed in the city of Ganzi after protesting on the street. She said
one woman, Dolma Yungzom, was shot five or six times point blank after
she unfurled a banner, though Ms. Tethong provided no evidence.

Andrew Jacobs reported from Beijing, and Colin Moynihan from New York.